RSS
MSNBC: Four Months of Disinformation on Israel and Gaza War
An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg
Since the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 — an attack in which 1,200 women, children, and men were tortured, raped, and killed — MSNBC has churned out multiple biased reports. Mehdi Hasan’s recent departure from the network is a positive step, but it does not go far enough to address the problems there. Many of the network’s other commentators continue to distort events related to the war, which Hamas started.
CAMERA has examined nearly four months of MSNBC coverage. One common distortion we found was the presentation of Hamas casualty statistics without caveat, emphasizing the alleged number of civilian and child casualties, without noting that Hamas itself does not distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties. MSNBC has also presented these statistics without noting that Hamas recruits child soldiers; that some of those casualties have been caused by shortfalls of Palestinian rockets; that the numbers can’t be verified by any outside or unbiased source; and that the numbers of combatants the IDF claimed to have eliminated have not been subtracted from this number. Moreover, CAMERA noted at least two cases — NBC reporter Matt Bradley on January 25, and guest Kevin Baron on December 17 — in which MSNBC falsely characterized the entire Hamas-supplied casualty count as “civilians.”
Another recurring issue is the elevation of Jews who hold fringe positions and have limited credentials, such as Sarah Schulman, a fiction writer who teaches at the College of Staten Island and is an advisory board member of Jewish Voice for Peace (October 29); Daniel Levy, presented as an “Israeli peace negotiator,” but who never negotiated anything that was successful (December 14 and January 14); Masha Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker who has no particular expertise in the Middle East (December 17); Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the fringe group IfNotNow (December 17); or even MSNBC’s own Peter Beinart. The vast, vast majority of both American and Israeli Jews support Israel in its defensive war against Hamas. But MSNBC presents such guests as if they hold expertise or authority, creating a false impression of a division in Jewish opinion about the war. Such individuals represent a tiny and extreme minority opinion at best, and are not representative of the Jewish community.
Perhaps most disturbingly, in two cases, we found that guests on the show had, functionally, called for the US to force Israel to surrender: Ilan Pappé on December 10 called on the US to “bring an end to the destruction of Gaza,” and Daniel Levy on January 14 called for the Biden administration to “use [its] leverage,” to curb Israel’s military campaign.
But another trend that we saw was an even more harmful form of misinformation by omission — specifically, minimizing or outright ignoring the 2005 Israeli withdrawal and complete disengagement from Gaza in order to blame Israel for the October 7 attack.
In 2005, Israel withdrew every single civilian and soldier from Gaza, leaving Gaza with a greenhouse agricultural business, a beautiful coastline for tourism, and the opportunity for the people to chart their own course for the future. In 2006, when the people of Gaza had the opportunity for freedom, and the opportunity to build a peaceful and prosperous society, they elected Hamas, a group dedicated to the destruction of Israel. On October 7, 2023, Hamas acted on that sentiment, starting the most recent war (it previously had started numerous others by attacking Israel in other ways). But in one segment after another, MSNBC commentators repeatedly ignored this, blaming Israel’s “siege” or “occupation” of Gaza, rather than the election of Hamas, for the October 7 attack as well as for the current war.
This first happened on October 9, just two days after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. As previously noted by CAMERA, Joy Reid and her guests Peter Beinart, Ayman Mohyeldin, Ali Velshi, and Lt. General Stephen Twitty ignored Hamas’ dedication to genocidal violence against all Jews, as expressed in its charter and in its leaders’ rhetoric, omitted Israeli offers of Palestinian sovereignty and independence, and sought to imply that the carnage was inevitable due to Israel’s actions.
Reid did note that Israel withdrew from Gaza, and that subsequent to that withdrawal, Gaza elected Hamas, but she was either unable or unwilling to see the causal connection between the election of Hamas and Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza. Instead, she and her guests blamed Israel for the attack.
Later that month, on October 29, Sarah Schulman, as noted above, appeared as a guest on the network. She falsely claimed that, “for 75 years Palestinians have been murdered and displaced and incarcerated,” that “the conditions have been created that are completely untenable and they exploded,” and that “the violence is a consequence of the oppression,” even while insisting that she was not “excusing” Hamas’ attack.
On November 19, guest Omar Baddar stated, “we are here in the first place precisely because Palestinians have been denied freedom for decade after decade.” His co-panelist Peter Beinart agreed, saying, “ultimately, it’s only if Palestinians have a path to freedom, and they can see that ethical resistance, not what happened on October 7, but an ethical fight for freedom, is working, that’s the only way ultimately you’re going to weaken Hamas and make it an irrelevant political force.” And on November 27, guest Noura Erekat claimed that “there’s no military solution to this. … You actually have to end the occupation.”
On November 28, guest Omer Bartov, a Brown University professor, repeated the trope, saying, “if you keep people under siege for 16 years without any hope, without proper sanitation, without proper education, with very heavy unemployment, a place where they cannot leave, it becomes a pressure cooker. And people will want to break out.” And on January 2, Peter Beinart, again, said that “this Israeli government isn’t offering any vision whatsoever that might suggest that after Hamas, Palestinians, even if they had a completely different kind of leadership, might have any path to freedom. It’s basically just offering occupation and, frankly, apartheid. … The only way, it seems to me, to undermine Palestinian support for the kind of horrifying attack that we saw on October 7 is by showing Palestinians that by ethical resistance, resistance that follows international law, that they can actually achieve their freedom.”
All of these commentators ignored the Hamas Charter, which states, “Israel will exist, and will continue to exist, until Islam abolishes it….” It further states, “The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: ‘The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,” except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.’”
When the people of Gaza had freedom, in 2006, that is who they elected.
The war is not a consequence of the people of Gaza having been denied freedom by Israel, as so many of the MSNBC contributors want their viewers to believe. The war is a direct consequence of what happened when the people of Gaza had freedom. When MSNBC anchors allow guests and commentators to ignore Israel’s 2005 disengagement and Gaza’s 2006 election, they are promoting a form of misinformation.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
The post MSNBC: Four Months of Disinformation on Israel and Gaza War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Sen. Bernie Sanders Calls on Democrats to Stop Accepting Money From AIPAC
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), took to X/Twitter on Monday to call on all Democrats to stop accepting political donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential pro‑Israel lobbying entity.
In his tweet, Sanders wrote that AIPAC has aided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in waging an “illegal and immoral war being waged against the Palestinian people.” Sanders continued, claiming that “NO Democrat should accept money from AIPAC” while asserting that the organization helped “deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.”
Sanders’s post came in response to comments by former Obama administration foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, in which Rhodes urged Democrats to reject all future donations from AIPAC. Rhodes argued that AIPAC has influenced Democrats to take immoral stances on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that has delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, and you cannot give them a carve out,” Rhodes said on an episode of the podcast Pod Save the World. “We need to have this fight as a party, because these are the wrong people to have under your tent.”
Tommy Vietor, another former Obama administration official and podcast co-host, agreed, accusing AIPAC of “funneling money to front organizations that primary progressive Democrats.”
AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying firm in the US, has historically backed pro-Israel candidates from both parties. The organization does not specifically lobby against progressive candidates. AIPAC has aided the campaigns of pro-Israel progressives such as Ritchie Torres.
Sanders has long held an acrimonious relationship with AIPAC. In November 2023, he repudiated the group for supposedly having”supported dozens of GOP extremists who are undermining our democracy,” and urged his fellow Democrats to stand together in the fight for a world of peace, economic and social justice and climate sanity.”
Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under President Obama, has emerged as a vocal critic of Israeli policy, particularly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His skepticism is rooted in years of diplomatic frustration during the Obama administration, especially surrounding failed peace negotiations and Israel’s settlement expansions in the West Bank. Rhodes has often framed Israel’s hardline stance as a major obstacle to a two-state solution, and he has been critical of what he sees as unconditional U.S. support that enables right-wing Israeli policies. His stance reflects a broader shift among some American progressives who advocate for a more balanced U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sanders has long been a staunch critic of the Jewish state. Sanders has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “collective punishment” and “apartheid” against the Palestinian people. Although the senator initially condemned the Oct. 7 slaughters of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel by Hamas, he subsequently pushed for a “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group. Sanders also spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to implement a partial arms embargo on Israel in 2024.
In the 20 months following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, relations between the Democratic party and the Jewish state have deteriorated. Democratic lawmakers have grown more vocally critical of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, sometimes arguing that the Jewish state has recklessly endangered lives of Palestinian civilians. Moreover, polls indicate that Democratic voters have largely turned against Israel, intensifying pressure on liberal lawmakers to shift their tone regarding the war in Gaza.
The post Sen. Bernie Sanders Calls on Democrats to Stop Accepting Money From AIPAC first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Iranian National Charged in Plot to Subvert US Sanctions Against Islamic Republic
Iranians participating in a memorial ceremony for IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists in downtown Tehran, Iran, on July 2, 2025. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl via Reuters Connect.
Federal law enforcement officials have arrested an Iranian national after uncovering his alleged conspiracy to export US technology to Tehran in violation of a slew of economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday.
For May 2018 to July 2025, Bahram Mohammad Ostovari, 66, allegedly amassed “railway signaling and telecommunications systems” for transport to the Iranian government by using “two front companies” located in the United Arab Emirates. After filing fake orders for them with US vendors at Ostovari’s direction, the companies shipped the materials — which included “sophisticated computer processors” — to Tehran, having duped the US businesses into believing that they “were the end users.”
The Justice Department continued, “After he became a lawful permanent resident of the United States in May 2020, Ostovari continued to export, sell, and supply electronics and electrical components to [his company] in Iran,” noting that the technology became components of infrastructure projects commissioned by the Islamic Republic.
Ostovari has been charged with four criminal counts for allegedly violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (ITSR), under which conducting business with Iran is proscribed due to the country’s human rights abuses, material support for terrorism, and efforts to build a larger-scale nuclear program in violation of international non-proliferation obligations. Each count carries a 20-year maximum sentence in federal prison.
Ostovari is one of several Iranian nationals to become the subject of criminal proceedings involving crimes against the US this year.
In April, a resident of Great Falls, Virginia — Abouzar Rahmati, 42 — pleaded guilty to collecting intelligence on US infrastructure and providing it to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“From at least December 2017 through June 2024, Rahmati worked with Iranian government officials and intelligence operatives to act on their behalf in the United States, including by meeting with Iranian intelligence officers and government officials using a cover story to hide his conduct,” the Justice Department said at the time, noting that Rahmati even infiltrated a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that possesses “sensitive non-public information about the US aviation sector.”
Throughout the duration of his cover, Rahmati amassed “open-source and non-public materials about the US solar energy industry,” which he delivered to “Iranian intelligence officers.”
The government found that the operation began in August 2017, after Rahmati “offered his services” to a high-ranking Iranian government official who had once been employed by the country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, according to the Justice Department. Months later, he traveled to Iran, where Iranian agents assigned to him the espionage activity to which he pleaded guilty to perpetrating.
“Rahmati sent additional material relating to solar energy, solar panels, the FAA, US airports, and US air traffic control towers to his brother, who lived in Iran, so that he would provide those files to Iranian intelligence on Rahmati’s behalf,” the Justice Department continued. Rahmati also, it said, delivered 172 gigabytes worth of information related to the National Aerospace System (NAS) — which monitors US airspace, ensuring its safety for aircraft — and NAS Airport Surveillance to Iran during a trip he took there.
Rahmati faces up to 10 years in prison. He will be sentenced in August.
In November, three Iranian intelligence assets were charged with contriving a conspiracy to assassinate critics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as then US President-elect Donald Trump.
According to the Justice Department, Farhad Shakeri, 51; Carlisle Rivera, 49; and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, acted at the direction of and with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, to plot to murder a US citizen of Iranian origin in New York. Shakeri, who remains at large and is believed to reside in Iran, was allegedly the principal agent who managed the two other men, both residents of New York City who appeared in court.
Their broader purpose, prosecutors said, was to target nationals of the United States and its allies for attacks, including “assaults, kidnapping, and murder, both to repress and silence critical dissidents” and to exact revenge for the 2020 killing of then-IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq. Trump was president of the US at the time of the operation.
All three men are now charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy, and money laundering. Shakeri faces additional charges, including violating sanctions against Iran, providing support to a terrorist organization, and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Powers Act, offenses for which he could serve up to six decades in federal prison.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Iranian National Charged in Plot to Subvert US Sanctions Against Islamic Republic first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Kosher Israeli Restaurant Vandalized in Athens Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks Across Europe
A man waves a Palestinian flag as pro-Hamas demonstrators protest next to the Greek parliament, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Athens, Greece, May 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
An Israeli restaurant in Athens, Greece, was vandalized on Saturday night in one of the latest incidents amid a surge of antisemitic attacks across Europe, prompting a police investigation into the suspected hate crime.
In a video shared on social media, a group of six individuals can be seen entering King David Burger — a local kosher restaurant that opened just a month ago — scattering pamphlets and spraying black paint across walls, tables, and other surfaces throughout the establishment.
Restaurante israelí en Atenas atacado po pro-palestinos
Otro caso de acoso a una empresa israelí, esta vez en Atenas. El restaurante King David Burger de la capital griega, propiedad de un israelí, fue atacado anoche.
Un grupo de activistas propalestinos llegó al restaurante y,… pic.twitter.com/YGiqLBRNAF
— ITON GADOL es Israel y las comunidades judias (@Itongadol) July 13, 2025
The group of pro-Palestinian activists shouted antisemitic slurs and vandalized the establishment with graffiti, including slogans such as “No Zionist is safe here.”
The attackers also posted a sign on one of the restaurant’s windows that read, “All IDF soldiers are war criminals — we don’t want you here,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
According to local reports, many Israelis in Athens gathered outside the restaurant after the attack, with some singing “Am Israel Chai” (“The People of Israel Live”) as a show of solidarity.
The restaurant owner urged local authorities in Athens to take swift action and hold the perpetrators accountable.
“It would be a shame for the Israelis to leave Athens,” Zvika Levinson, the restaurant’s owner, told Israel Hayom. “But if authorities don’t act, the situation will not be good.”
Police reportedly told the owner that without clear identification of the individuals in the video, they are unable to make any arrests.
Since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents have surged to alarming levels across Europe. This recent attack is just one of the latest in a wave of anti-Jewish hate crimes that Greece and other countries have witnessed in recent months.
Last month, an Israeli tourist was attacked by a group of pro-Palestinian activists after they overheard him using Google Maps in Hebrew while navigating through Athens.
When the attackers realized the victim was speaking Hebrew, they began physically assaulting him while shouting antisemitic slurs.
Although local police arrived promptly, a large crowd had already gathered outside the restaurant where the victim had sought shelter.
At first, authorities mistakenly arrested the victim, accusing him of the attack. However, after video footage clarified the situation, they apologized and took him to the nearest hospital.
The post Kosher Israeli Restaurant Vandalized in Athens Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks Across Europe first appeared on Algemeiner.com.